Black Knight

Yeah, that feels familiar. TK's Zach was beloved by fans on AMC - except for the last years when Zach started behaving grossly, and it was the same thing then. He doubles down on it; he can't or won't play the sorts of nuances and layers that would keep his character from being so hateful. I used to think that maybe he just thought that was fitting for Zach, but he plays Ridge the same way in this respect and Ridge isn't Zach.

The other thing is that in the previous scene where the Waterfords moved into their new home, Fred asked Serena what she was going to do that day and Serena replied she was going to make the house a home. You could practically see any sense of attraction or interest that Fred had in his wife wither and die at that response. So now we cut to them after the big dinner which Serena has pulled off successfully, and now he's attracted to her. That juxtaposition of the flashback and the present-day sex was purposeful to underline this. One thing we saw throughout this episode is that in the past, Serena consistently made the mistake of stepping back without argument. Fred was semi-willing to fight for her, though who knows how much that would've done, but Serena didn't even want him to because she thought that the important thing was to be united rather than fight internally. She went straight into embracing the domestic homemaker role so as not to cause trouble when the new society was just establishing itself and even though we've seen in earlier episodes this season that she's bored with it now and would like to be part of the discussions and decision-making of the men again, it appears she waited too long to start trying. Fred had already been thinking of her as just a useless woman for some time - like he said here, he "forgot." Serena seems to have believed the issue could be revisited after the new world was established and things would get better, but instead they just got more and more restrictive. I agree with the person who said they wish they could have seen the look on Serena's face when the handmaids system was established and her household was assigned one. Maybe in a future episode!

I use e-books for traveling or if it's out-of-print and so an e-book is the only option. But I do wish I could make the switch, because space is a problem for me and yet I keep adding more books. I came across this line in a book I just read: "Her apartment is what happens when a used bookstore and a grandmother's bedroom love each other very, very much." Omit the "grandmother's" part and that's basically my home.

They had better write something for AZ that isn't the 847th World Apology Tour. Oh, who am I kidding? Nicole will hit town sobbing and repeating, "I'm sorry, Eric, I'm so sorry." I like Nicole and AZ but she is so rarely allowed to do anything else. At least AZ should be well-rested for all the crying jags she'll be embarking on. But maybe the hair stylists will be nicer to her this time.

I just finished Seanan McGuire's The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, the second book in her Rose Marshall series and the sequel to Sparrow Hill Road. Rose Marshall is a ghost who, because of how she died, is a hitchhiker ghost who features in a number of urban legends that are variations on her story. The first book was really a collection of short stories with a larger narrative thread holding them together, and each story was like its own urban legend. This second book is a single novel-length adventure of Rose's, and while it's interesting, what happens to her in this book quickly takes it out of the realm of urban legends into something different. I don't think it's possible to do a novel-length urban legend, so it makes sense, and I'm glad to have spent more time with Rose and the other characters and to learn more about this series' universe. But I just really missed the original book's series of riffs on urban legends - I'm always fascinated by retellings of myths and such, and retellings of urban legends was something I hadn't come across before. Rose's journey here is more mythic if anything - there's a quest, people who help and people who oppose, and the main riff the book does is on a Greek myth. But maybe the third book will have more of the Americana urban legend feel of the first book. And now I've started on Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, because I figured why not go from a book that features a bit of Greek myth to a book that's full-blown Greek myth?

This. And a second meaning is if you are having trouble paying attention to whatever you're doing at the moment - like a conversation you're having with someone, or an activity - because you are too busy thinking about something else. Thinking is good, but overthinking isn't because it often leads to rationalizations that result in poor decisions.

It probably helped that Camille is Adora's daughter since the pig farm appears to be a large portion of the town's economy. Amma seems to be doing well socially too. Plenty of very good businesspeople are utter shit at family relationships. Heck, isn't it practically a stereotype (especially with men)? It doesn't mean much of anything. The pig farm seems to go back generations, so it's a long-established business that also doesn't happen to require much innovation. Mainly Adora needs to have good managers in charge, which it appears she does since we haven't heard of any concerns about the business. And money is relative; I doubt Adora has millions in the bank. Maybe if you added up the value of the pig farm and the land and her house she'd be a millionaire on paper, but that's not liquid cash. Adora's family is wealthy as far as this town goes, because the cost of living is low and there isn't much money circulating through the town's economy, but in a more expensive area with a more varied economy, they'd be middle class at best. One of the reasons Adora would never leave this town - she couldn't be Queen Bee somewhere else.

Fair enough. I can see the argument for it, although you haven't addressed when he makes out with the young woman and thinks to himself afterwards that he's had a very good Christmas (and the way Christie structures those closing lines gives a hint that the two of them might not have stopped at kissing). Like I said before, that doesn't preclude him being ace, but to some degree it does muddy the picture given the author. Even nowadays lots of people still don't know much of anything about asexuality. Would Christie really have understood that an asexual man might still enjoy, in a non-sexual way, a snog under the mistletoe with a beautiful young woman? (A clearer case can actually be made for Miss Marple, given that as a woman of independent means she was certainly quite marriageable but still never married, and so far as I can recall we never hear of any type of attachment or dalliance or particular feeling for someone, unlike Poirot who is repeatedly shown as having a weakness for women, although the exact nature of that weakness can be debated.) But probably the better point to make is that you questioned Poirot having a girlfriend, but ace people can have girlfriends. They can fall in love, they can want to spend their lives with someone; they just don't feel a desire to have sex. (In a way it was easier for asexual people back then since the prohibitions against premarital sex were much stronger, so no one would think it odd if someone wanted to keep a courtship chaste. Unlike today where ace people often feel pressured by expectations within a couple of dates...) It's been a while since I've seen the movie, so I don't remember; did Poirot express any kind of sexual feeling for his lost love? I just remember him looking at her picture wistfully, but maybe he had a conversation with Mary Debenham that I forgot. Otherwise, you could just make it your head canon for the movie that this was a woman he loved but parted from once he explained to her that he'd never be able to give her the "usual" sort of marriage, or children, and she decided she couldn't live that way.

I read that (Killers of the Flower Moon) a couple of months ago. You're in for a fascinating - and infuriating, and heartbreaking - read. The widespread nature of the evil is just jaw-dropping.

It's complicated, so let's address Chad/Abby/Stefan specifically. If Stefan chose to do nothing, Chad's name would indeed be put on the birth certificate as the father and he would be the legal father. But if Stefan demanded a paternity test, Chad and Abby could refuse. Stefan would have to petition the court, and Chad and Abby would have a good chance of being able to rebut the demand by reason of being in an intact marriage, which is legally granted a lot of protections. The court cares more about a stable family unit, continuity for the child, than anything else - that's the reason a woman's husband is named the legal father barring any complications. Stefan does have a better chance with a baby, could maybe get lucky with a judge who might decide that it is in the baby's best interests to allow the paternity test. The longer Stefan were to wait to try to establish paternity, the increasingly less likely the court would be to allow this since the child will have spent so much time with Chad as his/her father. The passing of time also makes the status of Chad and Abby's relationship less important - if the child were, say, 6, Chad and Abby could be divorced and still have a good chance of being able to keep Chad as the legal father even though there's no longer a marriage to protect. (This is also why the law doesn't let men who for some time have been the legal but not biological fathers of their wife's children challenge paternity in order to deestablish themselves as the legal father, even if they've divorced the mother. Depending on the state, they have maybe two years from the time of the child's birth to challenge paternity in order to deestablish themselves as the legal father, and after that, they can't.)

Yes, I think "talking to management" and "dictating to management" are being conflated. They are not the same thing. Management still gets to decide. In JL's case, they probably figured that the chemistry wouldn't work even if JL did try her hardest. Chemistry isn't something that can be forced or acted, and I can see where playing something romantic with someone who looks just like your sibling would throw things off on an instinctive level. No, you don't have to actually be attracted to your co-star, but most sibling relationships have a natural, inherent repulsion for anything resembling sexual attraction (and it's a different sort of repulsion than with someone you don't like). As for KdP, while she is the ultimate Company Woman - I also remember a number of WTF? looks on her face, and CM's, during their sex scenes. They played the scenes but clearly had a lot of trouble making any sense of them, which I can't fault them for because it was a nonsensical development, and it certainly affected the chemistry and believability of the fling. There was one sex scene in particular that was so awkward and lacking in the necessary momentum of passion for two characters' judgement to be overwhelmed so majorly that it was as if the actors had been told this was just a technical rehearsal to go through the blocking. This is with two actors who are both talented and professional.

And also Jodes, Ashley's sister who is one of the two girls always hanging out with Amma.

It kind of cracked me up when Adora busted up Camille's interview of Bob Nash. What other reporter in crime fiction has ever had to deal with her own mother getting in the way so much? And on the flip side, in yet another instance of Adora's power in this town, we see that the sheriff will discuss details of the investigation with her. If she ever actually wanted to help Camille instead of hindering her she could actually hook her up with everyone. But she won't. And Camille, please stop apologizing to Adora. You must know by now that you will never win with her. I get it, it's a pattern she can't break (kind of like her cutting), but it's painful watching her try over and over with Adora. Why is Ashley with John? She seems status-obsessed and I don't see where he gives her any status - if anything, he hurts her social standing (and did even before his sister was murdered and the town started suspecting him). He's not on the football team, he doesn't have many if any friends, he's not some hunk. She doesn't love him. So what is it? Amma was awful to Camille, but judging from the way her final flashbacks of Alice immediately followed that, it seemed like Camille saw past Amma's awfulness to the pain that must be driving it.

Mansplaining to me is when a man directly ignores a woman's lived experience in some way: For instance, telling a woman something you would know she already knows if you did not view her as an inferior being, or directly contradicting her lived experience to say that "It wasn't really like that," or "Things like that don't happen."

Surroundings do matter. There have been studies done on, for instance, the difference between having a tidy office vs. a messy office. And in Jane's case, the things she specifically cited about liking her old desk are things that are distractions - eavesdropping on Jacqueline's calls, chatting to other people. Wouldn't surprise me if Jacqueline knew that and that's why Jane is now sitting somewhere where she'll concentrate on her actual work. Because it's not about that, it's about keeping Pinstripe in the mix as a love interest Jane will eventually get involved with again. Otherwise they would just have her talk (even more) to Sutton or Kat or Jacqueline - a woman having three female sounding boards on a TV show is so rare, it's hardly as if this show is failing the Bechdel test or making only a token effort in that direction. In Jane's case not only is her friendship with Kat and Sutton the central relationship of the show, but her relationship with Jacqueline has also been elevated to probably the second most central relationship of the show. I don't mind the Kat/Adena drama and I appreciate that they actually presented an open relationship as an option, but they really need to point out that the way Adena did it isn't how it should be done. She wrote up rules on her own without any input from Kat. There has to be an actual two-way conversation about about how an open relationship would be handled. And as soon as Adena mentioned that one of the rules was no talking about it, I knew it wasn't going to work. If that's the only way Adena can handle an open relationship, that's perfectly valid - for her. Kat is someone who processes by talking about things, and she doesn't want a relationship where she can't process with her significant other - otherwise to her there's not much point in being in a relationship at all. And that's perfectly valid - for Kat. They both probably can handle an open relationship, but not with each other. There's a fundamental incompatibility there that an actual discussion about ground rules would have laid bare very quickly if Adena hadn't just come up with them on her own and dumped them on Kat. Kat should have objected more and probably would have except she'd been expecting to be dumped and I think she was so relieved it wasn't that that she went along. The Jane/Sutton storyline was so problematically handled for all the reasons posters have already given. But I did love Kat practically trying to wish herself into vanishing off the couch into thin air at one point while Jane and Sutton were fighting. Most of us have been there, Kat.

Because she was in the forest. It's dumb. If all the scenes of her after the crisis started had taken place strictly in the buildings/streets of the theme park where the ground was always flat, then I wouldn't have had a problem with it. In that type of surroundings, women can certainly run in high heels, so the later T-Rex scene wasn't an issue for me. She was running on concrete there. But people can easily roll, sprain or break their ankles in the woods even when walking at a leisurely pace on at least somewhat defined trails in more appropriate footgear. The fact that she didn't while needing to scramble around the woods off-trail was eye-rolling, when the only reason they had her keep her heels as heels for the woods was because they wanted to objectify Claire sexually. It's much like when fictional women warriors are made to wear skimpy armor that provides no real protection, just to provide eye candy. Bryce Dallas Howard is an attractive woman. They don't need to make the Claire character wear heels in the woods for her to be attractive. It's the (thankfully somewhat fading) attitude that they'll allow a woman to be badass only if she still fits into stereotypical or bimbo-y feminine wear while doing so. I didn't see the shot of her boots in this movie as a direct attack on Claire as you do; I saw it as an attack on the previous film's decisionmakers who chose to have her keep her heels as heels in the woods because of a mentality that women have to wear high heels to be attractive. I wear high heels infrequently, but other women do regularly and are quite skilled in moving around and that's fine (except for when they overwear them - what you said about some finding high heels more comfortable than flats is actually a bad sign of over-wearing, because it means they've worn high heels so much that their tendons have tightened up to the point that they can no longer stretch to a normal length. That's going to create issues when they're older and develop the typical balance issues of the elderly, which will preclude them continuing to wear high heels). But no matter how good someone is at wearing high heels they are not and never will be something that you can wear outside in a frigging forest. Anyone who has spent time hiking in a forest would know that a high-heel-converted-to-flat, even if still somewhat awkward since it wasn't designed to be a flat, is still better than wearing a shoe that tapers to a point on one end.

That's inspired by the books, in which he has a long-standing infatuation with the beautiful jewel thief Countess Vera Rossakoff, to the point that he allows her to escape being apprehended. Hastings ribs him about his being smitten with her. And in a short story set during Christmastime, at the close of his investigation a young woman takes the opportunity to snog him under a mistletoe, to his enjoyment. I'm not sure where he was established as asexual. Being in love and enjoying kissing don't preclude his being asexual, of course; ace people can be in love, and some truly enjoy kissing as a form of connection. But I don't remember any confirmation of his being ace.

She couldn't help that she was wearing heels, but all she needed to do was break the heels off, effectively turning her shoes into flats. It would have taken five seconds. After Owen's criticism she took the time to fix her clothes but not her shoes? No. That was ridiculous. In the mid-90s on the soap Another World, a couple in fancy dress were kidnapped and left in a forest to die. The woman briefly tried to walk in her high heels and realized she'd break an ankle quickly, so they knocked the heels off her shoes. Soap opera. In the mid-90s. So yeah, I expect more intelligence in regards to this point even in a silly popcorn flick, and I was amused by the shot of Claire's boots here, a meta acknowledgment of the mistake in the previous film. Having just come back from seeing the movie, my verdict is also "meh." I enjoyed JW a lot more, and of course the original JP is still the best. I will give the third a try though. I do understand why they have to move on from the park, although the house setting didn't feel entirely successful as a viable replacement. Maybe watching dinos tear up Vegas will be different.

Yes, I wasn't expecting that either. Music ended up being so important all throughout the book. And in regards to your comment about the ending -

SO is also my favorite of Flynn's novels. I've found I have to be careful about who I lend my copy out to, though, because the ending is so unremittingly dark. I had assumed people who had read and liked Gone Girl could tolerate SO's ending, but turns out that's not necessarily the case. I'm curious if the TV show will dare to end the same way.

I googled it and dentists use something called extraction forceps - which are also referred to as "dental pliers" and described as pliers-like. So yeah, pliers are what's used to pull teeth, fancy title or no. (There's also a dental tool called an elevator, but that's apparently just used to move the tooth around to loosen it before then going to work with the pliers.) But I agree, the whole "the tooth was pulled so it has to be a man" is silly thinking on the cops' part. As noted above, there are plenty of female dentists.

Cool, I'll be curious what you make of the ending!

Heh. Since this whole storyline smacks so much of OLTL Jess's alters and how Natalie usually suffered most from them (held prisoner, nearly murdered, etc.) but was always discouraged from being upset - your comment reminds me of how I always wanted Natalie to go on a tear and then blame it all on a newly emerged alter, Katty Balsom.

That explains why I've never been able to finish, or even get very deep into, any John Irving book. There are authors for whom I'll like one of their books but not another because they're rather different....but I've always bounced off Irving hard. I'm relieved he's enough out of the spotlight now that I don't have people giving me Irving books as presents anymore. It was always a bad moment for me when I'd unwrap a gift to find an Irving book and have to pretend enthusiasm - especially since whichever it was (almost always World According to Garp or Prayer for Owen Meany) was usually one of the very favorite books of the gifter and so he or she would be so excited for me to read it and love it as much as they do...

In regards to #1, the book is entirely through Camille's eyes. The show is being told mostly through her eyes, but not completely - Camille wasn't present for that Alan/Adora scene, nor has she been present for other scenes involving Chris Messina's character, for instance. Many people don't want to think about their parents as sexual beings, so Camille perceiving Adora/Alan's relationship as asexual really doesn't mean anything about the actual nature of their relationship. In reality, they've had two children together, and Camille saying she wasn't sure how they were even conceived just underlines how she's entirely unable to deal with her mother and stepfather as sexual beings, because duh. A stork didn't bring Marian and Amma. I thought the Alan/Adora scene made a lot of sense. First, they're alone; even leaving aside Camille's subjective viewpoint it's not surprising that they act differently when alone than when one or more of their children are present. They've been married a long time; there's a history and connection and some compatibility. Adora is a narcissist and narcissists often keep their unfortunate partners on a string by being alternately unattainable and a little yielding; they also like being romanced because, after all, it feeds into their egos. This scene showed that dynamic well - Alan longing for Adora, and Adora enjoying that and giving him just a taste before pulling away. He's still been shown in the TV series to be largely subservient to Adora, but it's not surprising to see that he's not quite as weak as he came across in Camille's viewpoint. Camille is not a reliable narrator; it's not that she lies, but she's so emotionally and psychologically damaged that all her observations are skewed. Adora dominates her psyche; naturally Alan shrinks in comparison. #2 - Since it's a TV series, they have to flesh out secondary characters and the murder investigation more. As the detective noted, it's standard to look at the male relatives. Bob would absolutely be looked at in an investigation, same as John - more so really because Bob's daughter was the first victim - and since it's a TV show they have the time to play that out. Viewers would wonder if the investigation didn't include Bob. In the book, it's all through Camille's eyes, and Camille liked Bob, for the reason you said, so he was never a suspect in her mind and thus never presented as a suspect to the reader.